The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra’s Winter Festival is where the Garden State band brings its best. Its three weekends every January generally feature the best guest soloists and the NJSO’s most thoughtful programming and playing.

The final weekend of concerts of 2020’s Winter Festival was more ambitious than most. Not only did the NJSO program a particularly famous and daunting piece, they did so without the help a big star soloist. It was as if Maestra Xian Zhang was saying: we got this.

Wagner’s “Ring” is arguably the Mt. Everest of the classical canon, so the fact that Zhang wanted to tackle this shows her confidence in her orchestra. She programmed Lorin Maazel’s 1987 CD-length reduction of the 17-hour opera tetrology for symphony orchestra, which the NJSO has never dared perform before. Also, it should be noted that the late Maazel was a key mentor in Zhang’s career. She won his conductor’s competition in 2002 and then went on to work with him as an associate at the New York Philharmonic for years. So for both the NJSO and Zhang, this “Ring Without Words” was what might called these days “a flex.”

How did it turn out? Well, when dealing with mammoth egos like Wagner and Maazel, it might be best to quote another man with immense talent and no shame in promoting himself: “it ain’t bragging if you can back it up.”

Zhang and the NJSO produced an imperfect but mostly epic “Ring” on Friday night at Princeton’s Richardson Auditorium. Despite its length and highfalutin baggage, Wagner’s “Ring” is music for the masses. And at its simplest, Zhang’s interpretation on Friday succeeded: when you heard the Valkyries ride, your pulse quickened. More importantly though, Zhang gave thrust and shape to all the different parts of the score. It was rarely pristine, but it was never boring.

The opening notes of the piece, meant to evoke the “greenish twilight” of the Rhine River, didn’t quite shimmer; but then a few minutes later, the violas beautifully articulated the gathering clouds around Valhalla. “The Ring” is terribly taxing on horn sections, and here there were a few problems, from dropped notes to even a dropped mouthpiece that clanged on the floor. But generally, the NJSO horns delivered a sound and scope that was close to Wagnerian. And it should be noted that while Maazel himself usually conducted with tempi that made the piece longer than 70 minutes, Zhang’s baton brought this “Ring” in under an hour. So, while not a marvel of German precision, it was a worthy Jersey effort and show of ambition.

And what’s more, “The Ring Without Words,” was just the main event. Friday evening also featured two other pieces and a solid soloist to boot. Macedonian pianist Simon Trepceski is not a celebrity per se, but he is widely celebrated in the classical world. He joined the NJSO in a rollicking rendition of Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto #2.

Liszt was (in addition to being Wagner’s father-in-law) the world’s first rock-star musician—and considered by many to be the finest pianist ever. He wrote the second piano concerto as a showcase for himself just as Lisztomania was sweeping Europe in the mid-19th century.

Trepceski played the part—dressed in a tuxedo, sans tie, but with the tux shirt’s collar popped—performed with verve and technical proficiency. Despite ample chances to steal the show, he collaborated well with Zhang and her band. Interestingly, you could hear the seeds of Wagner’s “The Ring” in certain passages of the Liszt concerto. The two titans met the year after it premiered in 1839 and hearing these two pieces together shows how the famous Lizst’s style was absorbed by the then-unknown Wagner.

Most importantly to the audience, Zhang and Trepescki delivered a fun, flashy twenty minutes of music. (Principal cellist also shined again in a duet-like moment with the soloist.) One could write more, but this statement overheard during intermission in one of the turrets of Alexander Hall summed it up best: “now that was a piece of music.”

The one peril of ambitious programming is that while it is high-reward, it’s also high-risk. It certainly made sense for Zhang to start the program with Wagner’s prelude to Act 1 of the opera “Lohengrin.” First of all, it’s a gorgeous piece of music—plus it’s a work that Liszt championed. But it’s also incredibly complex and delicate. If conducting “The Ring” is the equivalent of putting on a Thanksgiving feast, the “Lohengrin” overture is like creating one perfect plate of sushi.

And sadly, the NJSO wasn’t up to this. Their playing of the “Lohengrin” prelude was actually cleaner than their “Ring,” but it had no magic. Baudelaire wrote that Wagner’s music could sound like “a growing intensity of light, so rapid that the dictionary’s range of nuances would not suffice to express this ever-increasing glow and radiance.” In the right hands, “Lohengrin” should (an can) have this effect of seeming both powerful and yet effortless.

At their best, the NJSO made the prelude sound not like light in musical form, but rather just another composition played by competent musicians. At their worst, it sounded simply clumsy. This didn’t mar the other achievements of the evening and the festival, but it did put them in context.